Madrasas

When we spoke of the capacities and problems of the faculties of theology in training the scholars and thinkers that the Muslim world needs, we did not say, and cannot say, that we regard them as institutions that have reached perfection, as the best they could possibly be.

Our sorry state is plain to see. In the post-caliphate conditions, Muslims have, above all, lost the integrity of their political body, and for a century they have been able to show neither the way nor the will to make up for it. Under these circumstances and conditions, all the solutions the Muslim world has tried to find must be assessed in the light of these very circumstances and conditions.

There were those who thought that, in what we said against people who compare the faculties of theology with the madrasas and belittle them, we were being unfair to the madrasas, even that we were belittling the madrasas on behalf of the faculties of theology. We are belittling nothing, and we cannot afford to squander things as if we could spend them lavishly. I have written many times before in this very column about the madrasas. If one looks back at those pieces alone, one sees that we took toward this institution, regarding its capacities and problems, an approach no different from the one we take toward the faculties of theology. They too are our institutions, and moreover institutions that performed an important duty in getting through hard times.

What I have drawn attention to regarding the madrasas concerns their institutional impossibilities. They have no official status and try to stand on their own means. That they cannot offer their graduates a defined and certain employment also confines them to a narrower field in selecting students. Even if it has eased somewhat today, they have always felt this official pressure from time to time. To point to these and similar limitations and say that it is impossible to expect the madrasas to develop a program of learning and research that would cover all the Islamic sciences is one thing. The question of the mission they have carried from the past to the present, and of the very valuable services they are performing at this moment, is something else entirely. We need not ignore any of it. If we are to move toward something better, the analysis of the situation must be made in a many-sided, cool-headed and realistic manner.

As is well known, with the Unification of Education the madrasas were officially closed, and the imam-hatip schools and the faculty of theology, which had been kept open for a while in their place, were also locked up as of 1933.

From that point on, every kind of Islamic education was banned, but in many places these bans could not prevent the people from carrying on their Islamic education by illegal means with their own resources. At precisely this point the ulema of the East in particular continued their educational activities by withdrawing underground. Thus the madrasas tried to survive as centers of a civil resistance movement on behalf of Islamic education.

Under these restrictions, for a long time it occurred to no one, and could not have occurred to anyone, to ask whether the education being given answered the needs of this age. The age was flowing over us as an enemy. The most up-to-date answer to that enemy could only be to carry on existing with patience and perseverance, to bend over what was left in one's hands and protect it without letting anyone touch even a single letter of it. Such a sensitivity also lies in the background of the conservatism the madrasa system showed toward being updated. Past experiences regarding who and where the desire for change or updating came from have always fed this sensitivity as a suspicious reflex and passed it on from generation to generation.

I have mentioned before, for example, that because of the intense controls in the Single Party period, it became impossible to carry on Islamic education in Arabic in Siirt. In this period Molla Abdülhakim, one of the grandsons of the famous Molla Halil of Siirt, whose madrasa was normally in Siirt, had to close his activity there in the new period and, thanks to the means the people of the village of Halenze, 3 km from Siirt, provided him, began to continue it in that village. Shut away with his students in the madrasa in Halenze from Friday evening, Abdülhakim Hoca kept giving his students the classical education until Thursday afternoon, with the help of villagers who stood watch at the door to warn against a gendarmerie raid. Sheikh Müşerref, Molla Bedrettin and their contemporaries, many scholars who today keep up the classical style of education in many villages, passed through this kind of education.

These generations have reached the present day having lived through all the conditions of the typical "men who raise roses" of the Republican period, in the phrase of Rasim Özdenören. This education also formed an example of the resistance of the civil populace in keeping up its own way. For, for better or worse, with its faults and its merits, this education was possible entirely through the support and patronage of the civil populace.

Indeed, the instructor needs of the Ankara Faculty of Theology, founded in 1949, and of Marmara University and the Higher Islamic Institutes founded in our other provinces were met in certain fields by those who had been trained in these illegal civil madrasas. In a sense, the faculties of theology had already been given a certain dose of madrasa vaccine, and to the extent that the vaccine took, these institutions became somewhat more the property of the people and of Islam. Here the madrasa represents not only the madrasa but also the civil populace that resisted a despotism that had declared war on its own values. Almost all the teachers of the faculties of theology who are considered more fitting to the description of scholar received their basic Islamic education from the madrasa in just this sense.

It is also very clear that the madrasas, whose strongest quality is that they are civil but whose lack of official recognition also constitutes a limitation for them, have a potential to make very powerful contributions to a better education in the Islamic sciences.

Let us look a little at how far this has been possible until now and how it could be from here on.